Latma Issues Call for Help

The nationalist weekly satire has run out of funds and will go offline at the end of the month. Unless…

By Gil Ronen

First Publish: 7/7/2013, 6:25 PM

Yariv Googleheimer

Screenshot by permission of Latma.co.il

Latma, the nationalist weekly video satire show, has run out of funds and will go offline at the end of the month, unless new donations make it possible to keep on producing the show.

Latma's chief screenwriter, Tal Gilad, published a Facebook status Sunday in which he denied the rumors that Channel 1 television is about to sign a contract with the show. "The bad guys are already celebrating," he wrote. The channel has been negotiating with Latma for two years, he said, but the negotiations are not serious.

"The ravens on the left can already smell the zero hour," Gilad added. "After four years in which we provided Zionist, courageous, Israeli satire – against the current, against all of the leftist incitement that had already become something everyone sat back and accepted, because they convinced everyone that 'this is how satire is.' Four year in which we cut them down. Four years in which the ears of [Peace Now's] Yariv Oppenheimer turned red with anger, when they discovered that they were not immune to criticism and biting satire."

"The inciters, the boycotters and the enemies of Israel also got their drubbings – from the Mavi Marmara clip that received millions of views, boosted morale in Israel and changed the outlook of many people in the world; to the Abba clip that infuriated Swedes after the Aftonbladet libel; to our beloved Tawil Fadiha, Palestinian Minister of Uncontrollable Rage – a character that would never have been created in the 'regular' satirical programs that keep hammering you over the head from the TV screens."

"All this is about to end, because the money has run out," Gilad explained. "We do not have the astronomical budgets that Eretz Nehederet has, we lack the unlimited support of organizations from Europe and elsewhere that call themselves 'human rights organizations.'"

Eretz Nehederet is Channel 2 television's flagship satirical program. It is viciously leftist and anti-settler – so much so that former MK Yaakov Katz promised its creators "a day of reckoning" when the nationalists gain power in Israel.